Blog
Is the Pen Mightier than the Mouse?
Last month’s column covered the Windows Creators update, and although there was a fair amount of detail on the Surface Dial, I mentioned Pen...
Musician/author Craig Anderton is an internationally recognized authority on music and technology. His onstage career spans from the 1960s with the group Mandrake, through the 2000s with electronic groups Air Liquide and Rei$$dorf Force, to the “power duo” EV2 with Public Enemy’s Brian Hardgroove, and EDM-oriented solo performances. He has played on, produced or mastered more than 20 major label recordings and hundreds of tracks, authored over 45 books, toured extensively, played Carnegie Hall, worked as a studio musician in the 70s, written over a thousand articles, lectured on technology and the arts (in 10 countries, 38 U.S. states, and three languages), and done sound design and consulting work for numerous music companies. He is a former President of The MIDI Association, and holds two patents related to audio technology. For free access to over 200 articles and more information, please visit craiganderton.org. For music and instructional videos, go to youtube.com/thecraiganderton.
Blog
Windows Creators Update Meets Pro Audio
Although concerns about Apple’s commitment to pro-level creators are likely overblown—Apple probably has a few tricks up its sleeve for 2018—Microsoft is doing a...
Blog
Cracks in the Mac?
Since its introduction, the Mac’s share of the pro audio market has been hugely disproportionate to its general market share. It upended the Amiga—at...
Blog
Touching and MIDI and Clouds—Oh My!
Although Apple wasn’t at NAMM, it chose that time slot to introduce Logic Pro X 10.3. And in typical Apple fashion, it embodied three...
Blog
Interfacing with Interfaces at NAMM 2017
NAMM has been making an effort to get pro audio more involved in the show, and the 2017 NAMM convention had more bait than...
Blog
EQ: The Next Generation
When plugins first appeared, the goal was often to provide virtual equivalents of hardware devices—similarly to how CGI originally reproduced reality less expensively. But...
Blog
Testing, Testing
Let’s salute the unsung hero of modern recording software: test and measurement. In the days of tape, your test gear was VU meters that...
Blog
Mixing and Mastering with “Self-Driving” Audio
Here’s an interesting workforce statistic: Far more jobs are lost to robots than to companies sending jobs overseas. But of course, as recording engineers,...
Blog
The 141st AES Anderton Awards
It’s been said the only survivors of a nuclear war would be cockroaches and Cher’s career…but then there’s the Anderton Awards, "honoring" the...
Blog
Is Video the DAW’s Final Frontier?
With a few exceptions, most recent DAW changes have been incremental: We haven’t seen huge breakthroughs like when Opcode’s Vision merged hard disk audio...
Blog
Fix It Before The Mix
When multitrack tape recording progressed beyond a few tracks, a new phrase was added to the recording lexicon: “Fix it in the mix,��...
Gear and Technology
Software Tech: Stability Wars
As we become ever-more dependent on computers, we increasingly run the risk of being blindsided by our tools.
news
Software: The State of the Software
Yes, these are challenging times—and times that are difficult to quantify.
news
The Ever-Evolving Subscription Model
It seems like only yesterday we covered changes in subscription software—last March, to be exact. But, in “computer years,” six months can be an...
news
Will Windows 10 Take It to Eleven?
One of the big surprises at Summer NAMM was Microsoft’s courtship of the audio industry, with both a general overview in the Davidson Ballroom,...
news
Can You Be Replaced by a Software Algorithm?
For decades, mastering was considered an arcane, difficult art capable of being mastered (sorry about the pun) only by those with Jedi-level skill sets.
news
Trending at Frankfurt Musikmesse
The biggest news in Frankfurt was the Messe hierarchy shakeup and subsequent schedule changes.
news
The Big Ten
Did you get your questionnaire from Apple and Microsoft about what audio/video-oriented features you wanted in their latest operating systems? Neither did I, so...
news
The Subscription Model Gathers Momentum
This column covered the subscription model in June 2013—but a lot has happened since then, and now our industry has followed Adobe’s lead.
Blog
Auto-Tune: The Controversy That Will Not Die
Auto-Tune hit the world in 1997, and Antares has continued to update its software since then.
Recording
The 2014 Anderton Awards
It was a cliffhanger: With the founder of the audio industry’s only virtual awards show absent due to pressing family concerns, the Anderton Awards...
Business
What’s Next for DAWs?
The late John Simonton, PAIA Electronics’ founder, was a visionary—and I don’t use that word often.
news
Leaning on Support
Many people maintain that DAWs have evolved to being much the same— they all cut, paste, copy, import, export, etc.
Recording
USB, FireWire, and Thunderbolt…Oh My!
In our computer-based world, every now and then, there’s a wrenching transition.
news
Who’s Minding the Storage?
The most valuable part of any computer is its data—and the amount of data being generated by the modern studio continues to increase.
Business
The 2013 Anderton Awards
The Anderton Awards, the virtual awards ceremony that hits AES every year like a 24-hour intestinal flu, got off to a great start!
news
Will Digital Downloads Save Quality Audio?
It’s clear that music distribution is increasingly about downloads and streaming (iTunes is the top US music retailer), which is certainly convenient—with a decent...
Blog
The 2012 Anderton Awards: AES Edition
The backdrop: a hotly-contested conflict of national importance, with mud-slinging partisans on both sides going over the top with condemnation and praise for their...
Business
The Specialized Interface
The March column covered the age of specialization in DAWs, and how more programs are taking a different tack rather than trying to be...
Business
NAMM’s Encore
In last issue’s Software Tech, we covered the iPad takeover of the Winter 2012 NAMM show, but there were many other developments with major...
Business
The NAMM iPad iNvasion
Here’s the lead sentence for last year’s Winter NAMM show column: “In my April 2010 column written after the debut of Apple’s iPad, I...
Business
The Apple Logic Pro 9 Flap
Apple has ditched Logic Express and SoundTrack Pro, put Logic Pro 9 in the App store as download-only for $199.99, and priced MainStage 2...
Business
The Anderton Awards
Even with the announcement that the Anderton Awards would proceed as planned (despite that little misunderstanding last year with celebrity presenter Kim Jong Il...
Gear and Technology
I Think, Therefore iPad
In my April 2010 column written after the debut of Apple’s iPad, I wrote, “The age of desktop dominance is over, which has major...